Happy 9th Anniversary, LibreOffice

Happy 9th Anniversary to LibreOffice, to the community of volunteer contributors  – represented by The Document Foundation – and to every person who made the dream possible with a donation or a simple download. If you have developed, patched, localized, tested, triaged, documented, communicated, promoted, explained, supported, certified, trained or migrated either the software or the organizations deploying it or the people using it, you should celebrate. Together, we have been able to transform a dream into a reality.

Thanks to Geralt for the image, released with a Pixabay License.

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.3.2

Berlin, September 26, 2019 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.3.2, the second minor release of the LibreOffice 6.3 family, with many bug and regression fixes. LibreOffice 6.3.2 “fresh” is targeted at technology enthusiasts and power users, who are suggested to update their current version.

LibreOffice’s individual users are helped by a global community of volunteers: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/community-support/. On the website and the wiki there are guides, manuals, tutorials and HowTos. Donations help us to make all of these resources available.

LibreOffice 6.3.2’s change log pages are available on TDF’s wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/6.3.2/RC1 (changed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/6.3.2/RC2 (changed in RC2).

LibreOffice in business

For enterprise class deployments, TDF strongly recommend sourcing LibreOffice from one of the ecosystem partners to get long-term supported releases, dedicated assistance, custom new features and bug fixes, and other benefits. Also, the work done by ecosystem partners flows back into the LibreOffice project, benefiting everyone.

Also, support for migrations and trainings should be sourced from certified professionals who provide value-added services which extend the reach of the community to the corporate world and offer CIOs and IT managers a solution in line with proprietary offerings.

In fact, LibreOffice – thanks to its mature codebase, rich feature set, strong support for open standards, excellent compatibility and long-term support options from certified partners – represents the ideal solution for businesses that want to regain control of their data and free themselves from vendor lock-in.

Availability of LibreOffice 6.3.2

LibreOffice 6.3.2 is immediately available from the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Minimum requirements are specified on the download page. TDF builds of the latest LibreOffice Online source code are available as Docker images: https://hub.docker.com/r/libreoffice/online/.

LibreOffice Online is fundamentally a server-based platform, and should be installed and configured by adding cloud storage and an SSL certificate. It might be considered an enabling technology for the cloud services offered by ISPs or the private cloud of enterprises and large organizations.

All versions of LibreOffice are built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org.

Support LibreOffice

LibreOffice users are invited to join the community at https://ask.libreoffice.org, where they can get and provide user-to-user support. People willing to contribute their time and professional skills to the project can visit the dedicated website at https://whatcanidoforlibreoffice.org.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can provide financial support to The Document Foundation with a donation via PayPal, credit card or other tools at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate.

Nepal: LibreOffice localisation event on Software Freedom Day 2019

Thanks to our worldwide community, LibreOffice is available in over 100 languages. Volunteers help to translate the software, documentation and website – and on Software Freedom Day, the Nepalese LibreOffice community organised a localisation event. Sanjog Sidgel reports:

Title: LibreOffice L10N, organised by Kathmandu University Open Source Community on Software Freedom Day 2019
Organizer: Kathmandu University Open Source Community, Kathmandu University, Dhulikhel, Nepal
Date: September 21st, 2019
Focus: LibreOffice English to Nepali Localization
Hosted by: Sanjog Sigdel & Saroj Dhakal
Duration: 1 hour
Outcome: 14 new volunteers signed up; we presented the guidelines for doing the translations; and together we translated around 376 text strings into the Nepali language in an hour.

I would like to give a shout out to Mr. Anil Shrestha, Co-ordinator of Kathmandu University Open Source Community and his working committee, for making this Software Freedom Day 2019 a grand success.

The Document Foundation says a big thanks to Sanjog, Saroj and everyone else for taking part – your efforts are really appreciated! Because of your help, millions of people around the world can benefit from free, open and standardised productivity tools, in many languages. Cheers!

Videos from LibreOffice Conference 2019: OpenDocument Format

LibreOffice can open documents in many formats, including Microsoft Office files (.docx, .xlxs, .pptx). But it’s native file format is the fully open and standardised OpenDocument Format (ODF). At the recent LibreOffice Conference 2019 in Spain, community members gave presentations about news and updates for ODF. So, here are the first videos from the presentations (use headphones for best audio quality).

Firstly, Marina Latini and Italo Vignoli explain the COSM project – the Community of ODF Specification Maintainers:

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Version 1.3 of the ODF specification is being developed, and Michael Stahl provides some technical background:

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Finally, Svante Schubert introduces the new ODF Toolkit from The Document Foundation:

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Keep checking the blog – and our Twitter and Mastodon accounts – for more videos in the coming days and weeks!

Video recap: LibreOffice Conference 2019 in Almeria, Spain

Here’s a quick recap of the LibreOffice Conference 2019 that took place last week in Almeria, Spain! Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll also upload videos from the individual presentations…

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LibreOffice Conference 2019: Photos from days 2 and 3

Last week was the LibreOffice Conference 2019 in Almeria, Spain. It was an awesome event, and great to see so many community members – a big thanks to everyone who took part! We already posted some photos from the first day, along with the video of the opening session. Now we have some photos from the second and third days, starting with the special bus that took us to the conference location every day…

Here’s Tomaž Vajngerl, Mike Kaganski and Heiko Tiezte talking about user interface design:

In one talk, Gabriele Ponzo discussed the role of The Document Foundation’s Membership Committee:

At lunch we enjoyed migas – it was great!

Collabora brought a virtual reality device – here’s QA engineer Xisco Fauli testing it out:

In another talk, we looked at encouraging people to contribute to LibreOffice, and the reasons why:

And then on the evening of the final day, we had a great guided tour of the Alcazaba of Almería

Coming up: there were many talks and presentations at the conference, so we’ll be uploading videos from them to our YouTube channel soon. Stay tuned to this blog for updates!